We've just announced some new research focusing on e-learning authoring strategies and tools, including the first of a series of three research papers. The first paper, titled E-learning Authoring: The Shifting Landscape analyses the the key forces driving changes to the way corporates are approaching the creation of bespoke e-learning, together with a high-level perspective of the new strategies for content authoring and new types of authoring tools. The next two papers, to be published in Q2 2010 will focus more specifically on a deeper analysis of the strategies and the tools.

http://tinyurl.com/ycjzk2p

Key learning trends 2010 - A quick response

The following was my short response to a recent question on the the key trends in learning in 2010. Any thoughts?

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Overall, Elearnity sees 2010 as a transformational year where lots of changes in 2009 become more formalised.

The biggest trend will be the reevaluation of the role and value of learning to the business. Training budgets were under a lot of pressure in 2009, with precedence given to mandatory learning that manages compliance risk but does not add real value or enhance performance. In 2010, companies will seek easier ways to automate their compliance agenda, and increasingly focus discretionary spend on enhancing the performance of the business, and building core capabilities.

Both agendas will see increased adoption of learning technology to better manage, focus, personalise and deliver key elements of the learning. Constraints on travel and subsistence budgets will continue to make virtual learning and e-learning attractive options. For many companies, these are now standard channels for learning, but many learners and trainers still lack the skills to use them effectively. More focus will need to be placed on the skills for effective virtual learning to support the growth in these channels.

The Future for E-Learning

David Wilson is founder and Managing Director of Elearnity and one of the leading authorities on learning innovation and e-learning in Europe. He speaks to TrainingZONE about the present and the possibilities for e-learning.

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Has e-learning come of age, or does it still have some way to go before it reaches its potential?
An interesting question Claire, in reality I think both are true. E-learning is definitely a mainstream capability in many of the leading corporate adopters, and there has been a well established and fairly robust supply-side market for e-learning for a number of years. So e-learning is now a fairly mature and is becoming increasingly pervasive in many market sectors and companies.

But that doesn’t mean it’s like that everywhere, or that e-learning is fixed in what it can do. We still encounter large organisations that have little use of e-learning, or are only piloting it. Whilst there is a perception that this is driven by learner acceptance, actually we see it as more of an L&D cultural issue first, and then a combination of infrastructure and learner acceptance second.

While e-learning might be a mature capability it’s still evolving rapidly. It’s diversifying away from the structured e-course model that came from computer/web-based training, towards a more holistic view of technology-enabled learning with many approaches and solutions.

Where does e-learning truly excel and where do you feel it has its limitations?
If by e-learning you mean e-courses, I would say they have a role in supporting basic knowledge or skills development in almost in any area. The key thing they deliver is a consistent learning approach on a scalable distributed basis. That’s a huge advantage for a large organisation or for training large numbers of people. This especially works well for the “acquisition” part of the learning process, and for some subjects, also for “practicing” it too. This is especially true for anything involving an IT system, or that can be modelled into an online role-play or simulation.

Other aspects of e-learning, such as e-assessment, can be used very broadly for all forms of learning, both for formal testing and assessment, and also for personal diagnosis to streamline the learning process. Both of these areas are very interesting now and very generally applicable in most mainstream learning programmes.

I haven’t just said use e-learning for compliance, which has been a massive driver for e-learning over the last few years. It’s not that I think e-learning isn’t any good for compliance, of course it is. But e-learning has been unnecessarily pigeon-holed as a tool purely for compliance and mandatory learning in many organisations. Clearly there are big benefits for compliance; both in terms of consistency and scalability, but also because of the automatic tracking and reporting benefits as well. But e-learning can and should be being applied more generally, both as a standalone solution and integrated into blended programmes, and also for assessment, performance support, specialist advanced learning and so on.

What is it not good for? I think e-courses definitely have their limitations, partly because of the constraints for doing them properly, and sometimes due to subject matter. People often focus on subject matter limitations but I am less convinced. I think you can find high quality and effective e-learning on almost any subject you can think of. But delivering structured e-courses that require 30 minutes plus to complete obviously creates constraints. Elearnity’s research shows a shift towards performance support and referenceware materials for just-in-time needs, and collaborative learning tools for deeper learning needs. It’s about horses for courses, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

When it comes to rapid e-learning, often members ask which tool is best. In your opinion is there much difference between products, and what are the limitations of rapid e-learning?
In my opinion, there’s much too much attention at the moment on the tools part of the rapid e-learning question. There’s no doubt that rapid e-learning is a growing area in nearly all corporates, and much of the current debate is about tool selection. But Elearnity’s research doesn’t endorse this. Yes a bad tool will be a barrier, but a good tool is not a guarantee of success. The biggest issues are around process and expertise rather than tool. And by process I mean the whole process, not just the development task.

Rapid e-learning for most companies is part of what I described as the diversifying of e-learning. It is about collapsing the supply-chain for e-content and pushing it closer to the subject expert, either directly with them doing it, or with someone they can work with closely. To do that you need tools than can be used by non-e-learning specialists, and you need to create valid learning, and that is the challenge. Companies have comprehensively proved with PowerPoint that they can generate tons of presentation materials, but how much of it is high-quality learning? Rapid tools can aggravate that problem further – especially if the people producing it don’t have instructional expertise or understanding. They may know about the subject matter, but do they understanding “learning”?

Content is only useful if its accessible and usable, and if its valid. There are big challenges for organisations with many people creating content, but then trying to push it through a narrow pipe (called their e-learning team) to get it loaded onto the corporate LMS.

In short, rapid e-learning concepts are an important part of the diversification of e-learning, and have a real role to play in enabling local content creation. But they are part of a much larger story, and the short term exclusive focus on tools is misplaced.

There is a good deal of talk about how a VLE/intranet can facilitate informal learning. Do you feel that the potential of technology is being explored by organisations in this respect?
Informal learning emerged last year as a big topic amongst the market commentators, but I don’t think it has really impacted mainstream corporate thinking yet. Some of the leading corporates have been publicly talking about it, but most organisations are still focusing on their formal learning agenda. I don’t expect this to change much this year, but maybe it will become more of an explicit issue in 2008 and beyond.

I do think that technology has a role to play with informal learning, but we need to understand what we mean by informal first. This is where all the discussion of “80% of all learning is informal” starts getting a bit vague. For example, is coaching formal or informal? Is spending some time with a colleague to learn how to do something, formal or informal? Is accessing some performance support materials live in the work process, formal or informal? A lot of learning in companies is not managed or tracked by L&D but that doesn’t make it informal. It can very structured, and facilitated or delivered by professional training staff or coaches, but it isn’t described centrally as a formal programme or course.

Technology can clearly help facilitate informal processes of learning, both through search and through access to content and to people. Arguably the biggest learning tool on the planet is called the Internet, and one of its main LMSs is called Google, but that’s not how people think about it. Adoption of more informal thinking internally within companies, coupled with tools for live collaboration will be the start. But I also expect to see more pressure on integration of learning processes and content with work processes and content. At the moment they tend to be pretty distinct in most companies, but informal learning will blur the boundaries. At the back-end, this will also mean growth in content management and integrated search as well.

How have technologies such as podcasting, wikis etc added to the potential of e-learning?
As someone who spends most of their life learning online and informally, especially over the Internet, I find podcasts on their own to be too limiting. I have to listen to the thing to find out whether it’s worth listening too, which is nonsense. Having said that, I still feel it’s an important direction, especially for delivery to mobile and non-visual devices.

In some recent research we did only 13% of early adopter companies were using Wikis for learning on a regular basis. So they are not mainstream yet (for learning). But the concept of collaborative self-generation of learning content is a really powerful idea – especially when if you can everyone engaged as an active participant. Research shows that retention of learning is significantly enhanced if you become the teacher rather than just the learner.

This dynamic is under explored currently and I think it has potential to be very useful, particularly for developmental learning rather than basic knowledge acquisition. But as with any collaborative approach, there are the problems of non-contribution (lurking), editorial control, and so on. But these can be resolved. I expect we will see more use of Wiki-like approaches in the future, although probably with embedded learning structure in the Wiki templates to make it easier to manage and validate the learning process and outcomes.

And finally, how do you feel we will be learning in five years time?
Ah the million dollar question! Well I guess that partly depends a bit on how you are learning now!

If you are currently (individual or organisation) still pretty much focused on formal and traditional learning approaches, then I think the next five years will see slow but increasing change. Increasing pressure of business will force you to change your assumptions about how, where and when you learn. You will have to be learning online and probably by mobile devices just to keep up, and keep compliant.

You will be using e-assessment to focus your learning time as well as to certify you’ve completed it successfully. Much of your learning time will be tracked and reported (you’re in that kind of company), and tracking will help you access learning that is more relevant. Much of this is available today, but it will have become pervasive, at least within large organisations.

If you already learn online, and mainly informally or through your own research on the Internet or through your personal network, then I think things will change even more significantly.

Learning anywhere will become a key requirement, via any connected device. Much of your learning will be informally delivered, but through formal mechanisms to help you find it, access it, and deliver it using a variety of media types depending on your context. Much of this will be about access to people, not just access to content. All of it will need to be focused on your specific needs or context, and to be integrated with other learning mechanisms to add more depth or context when you need it. More learning will be collaborative rather than individual, both synchronous and asynchronous.

Companies will need to offer a holistic learning environment, skewed to delivering the above services rather than generic learning content. Formal learning programmes will still exist but be a lower proportion of recognised learning time. Programmes will be blended learning processes, utilising e-learning and face-to-face learning time to maximise value and impact, and to maximise flexibility.

There are other new areas of learning for which we expect to see increasing adoption. I have talked about wikis and collaborative tools already. We also expect to see increasing use of gaming and complex simulations, and use of intelligent learning agents to aggregate and to personalise learning for you. Will this happen in five years? Yes, at least in part, but many of the mainstream implications of it will be beyond that period.

In summary, much of the technology to do this is around today, but it’s not well-connected or pervasive. The challenge for many big organisations will be to be able to consume this fast enough to stay up with some of their more nimble competitors. This is especially difficult on a global stage, and when you have to migrate a corporate IT infrastructure. But there will be an increasing realisation that not learning like this is an indulgence that the majority cannot afford, either in cost, but most of all in terms of time.

David Wilson will speaking at the Learning Technologies Conference on 31 January.

Virtual Classrooms - do we need specialist tools?

Donald Clark has raised a point about Virtual Classrooms tools as part of a post he made on Vapid Development Tools. "And while we're at it, why bother with all of this fancy virtual classroom stuff when we have messenger, netmeeting and Skype. If you want collaboration, it's already there, usually on your toolbar!"

I agree with the sentiment, the case for VC as distinct tools is much more marginal than it use to be. That was always part of Microsoft's long game - to embed the capabilities for collaboration into their core infrastrastructure. Don't forget that Microsoft bought Placeware (one of those VC tools) to for a core component of its Live Meeting capabilities.

Innovation with messenger/sametime tools and voice over ip services like Skype have accelerated this further, but more importantly made these services highly available with a very low cost of entry, i.e. free or virtually free, especially for the individual user. But there is still a reality gap for those stuck in corporate IT infrastructures. For those of us outside them who are able to use any tool we think will add some value to how we work it is much easier. As a small business we frequently find our options for live collaboration and virtual meetings decrease with corporate clients! A virtual classroom that provides a single integrated capability can still have some value here, but less than it used to.

The other key factor with VC tools is the specialist functionality they have embedded to streamline use of the tool for supporting learning events. This used to (5 years ago) include whiteboard tools and app sharing but now this is common in the collaboration tools. But there's other functionality too. Standard web collaboration tools can be fine for virtual meetings, and webinar tools are fine for large 1 to many events, but running high-quality structured learning with a group of 10-20 people can require additional help to make it work effectively. A good example of this is virtual break-out rooms.

But this kind of functionality will also make its way into the basic web collaboration tools too - if it proves to be really useful. That's why I find the discussion of functionality has become second in this post rather than first. A few years ago it would have been the other round. Now the limitations of the popular web collaboration tools are much less and their reach is much greater. The challenge for the VC vendors is to continue to differentiate their products or to integrate them into other solutions that have sufficient commercial value to give the VC away within an integrated offer. Our guess is that this is where the LMS/e-learning suite vendors will be forced over time, even if (as in Saba's case) it currently represents a significant revenue stream currently.

David

Corporate e-learning trends - headlines for Europe

I know it seems a bit early to start the "what's the trends for 2007" stories, but someone just asked me for such a view based on our corporate research. Thought you might also be interested in the answer. As always, happy for feedback.

For 2007, we expect the key developments for corporates to be around a) reconstructing and expanding the e-learning supply chain, b) reengineering and integrating learning management processes, and c) a diversifcation of e-learning content including experimentation with alternative delivery approaches.

A big part of a) is adoption of rapid e-learning inside corporates, and we expect most organisations to acquire tools and grow activities (if they haven't done so already). But we expect corporates to also start to realise the limitations of the rapid model, not least, the challenges for managing quality, educational value, and technical assurance. Whilst we are advocates of rapid e-learning, we also believe it is significantly over-hyped currently, and more sophisticated approaches are required. In addition, we also expect to see more changes in the ways corporates use external custom e-learning developers with increasing pressures for lower-cost, more rapid external solutions as well, and for self-maintenance.

b) Many corporates are reevaluating their LMS strategy going forward, and now increasingly interested in integrated talent and performance management. Although consistent with the grand ERP/HRMS story, and often the overall direction for extending use of their ERP platform, the HR sub-functions are sceptical of the fit of these products to their specific functional needs. We expect to see tactical successes for the LMS vendors in the performance and talent space, although longer term we still expect to see pressure from IT for a single integrated HR/ERP solution.

c) Although Wikis and podcasting maybe very trendy currently, most corporates are not really using them. We expect to see more experimentation in 2007, and some very interesting project successes, but we do not expect this to become truly mainstream in corporate usage. We also expect to see a shift away from traditional large e-learning course-based content towards smaller, more granular just-in-time e-content and performance support. We also expect to see referenceware growing in popularity relative to traditional e-learning courses, and greater adoption of virtual meeting/classroom technologies, which have now matured and are more widely available.

Across all of the above we expect to see more externalising of the infrastructure to deliver it, i.e. further growth in ASP or Software as a Service delivered infrastructure and solutions.

Key corporate drivers: immediate solutions, lower cost, more flexibility, more connected/aligned, bypassing internal constraints

The LMS M&A Drag Factor

We all know there has been (and still is) a lot of mergers & acquisition activity in the LMS market, with plenty of consolidation going on. But although we've seen a lot of vendor consolidation, how much consolidation of products have we actually been.

Whilst some of the vendors have been very focused on trying to consolidate market share, they seem to be struggling to actually consolidate the customer bases underneath them. For example, Click2Learn and Docent merged to form SumTotal Systems. SumTotal then buys Pathlore, who itself had fairly recently bought DK Systems, and Pathlore still had quite a lot of old Registrar customers that still hadn't moved off that platform. Now SumTotal may have a large user base, but user base for what? Certainly not the current SumTotal platform - yet. And SumTotal is not unique by any stretch of imagination. We even see this is smaller regional providers that have been playing the M&A game. Most of the LMS vendors have at least some of this kind of historical consolidation challenge.

One key reason for this is because many of the major customers just upgrade to the latest release of their old product to maximise their support window. They then sit and wait to see how things evolve with the new company. So it takes a while, often more than two years plus to see how a given customer base will react to the acquisition of its vendor, sometimes longer. We're also seeing the same thing happening (but with even longer timescales) in the HR systems space following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. This isn't so much a function of size, but of perceived effort versus value to move sooner.

Elearnity has been tracking and analysing these vendors for many years. But one new strategic consideration that we're now factoring in is what I call the "LMS M&A Drag Factor". Its all full well and good having a large user base, but you have to be able to service it and move it forward. That's tough to do in the LMS world with multiple platforms and technology bases. The more diverse this is, the more effort needed to leverage it yourself, and the bigger your investment sometimes needed to create something more compelling to move everyone forward with you, rather than jumping ship with someone else. I think the LMS M&A Drag Factor will have quite an influence on individual companies performances in 2007/8.

David

Tony Karrer comments on DTI Blended post

Tony Karrer, a US blogger with some interesting views has picked up my blog on the DTI research on blended learning. I would be really interested in what readers (US and otherwise) make of this issue.

The statement from the DTI research was unequivocal - blended was old news! Like you I think this is not a correct message, but I don't think it's just confusing blended as a label versus blended as a practice.

From our research, we still blended as the fundamental model for any structured capability development, as well as for high-impact project-based learning. Here is a link to some of the public domain research info we've put out on blended.

One additional point. One of the problems of blended was that it was a hype jargon, and became a bandwagon for lots of people to jump on, and subsequently off. This always happens of course, the equivalent for this year is probably "informal learning". Now, I don't mean these things are important or right, just that they encourage or allow many people (customers and suppliers) to: start using the term for a while, make some cosmetic changes, and then adopt the next bandwagon as it emerges. We see this all the time. Makes you look like your leading edge, but at the same time results in little different outcomes or any sustainable change in thinking and approach.

Its the latter that really interests me - for blended, for informal, or for any from any significant innovation!

Is "Blended" really dead?

One of the topics briefly touched on at the DTI Beyond eLearning session was the lack of any interest in the topic of Blended Learning in the US companies the group visited. According to Alec Keith, the US was not interested in discussing the topic, "Blended Learning is still in the literature, but not discussed seriously" was one specific comment. So is Blended Learning really dead?

From our research in corporates in the UK and Europe, we would say no, and for two reasons. Firstly, I think we're still partly in the hype curve of Blended Learning. Many UK/European corporates are still at the early stages of realising that the e-learning story is not going away and they have an increasing need for integrated learning approaches. Partly this is still driven by market hype, but it is also magnified by hard drivers of reducing cost and increasing the reach of learning programmes.

Much of this blending is not actually very blended. Lowest common denominator thinking drives decisions to chop down classroom time and substitute in e-learning content that is not really integrated with the classroom content. From a research project Elearnity did a year or so ago, most blended design seems to singularly focus on selecting media - in particular where should we use e-learning. I think far much too much attention has been payed to this.

This leads to the second and more profound reason why I think Blended Learning is not actually dead. Blended Learning should force us to focus on learning as a process rather than as a series of events. The value of blended learning should be in understanding and describing that process, and then understanding the interplay between and the added value through the components of the process, i.e. the whole design, not just the selection of specific media types. Process-based and integrated.

Whilst I may not personally like the term "blended learning" very much, I feel it is worthwhile if it forces us to design holistic learning processes rather than media-delivered events. But our research indicates that is not happening yet, and so, for good or bad, I will disagree with the US DTI research and keep advocating blended as one of our learning stories.

Once we have that as the norm, I would certainly be happy to consign it to the bin adn just call it learning!

DTI Global Watch - Beyond E-learning

I recently went to the launch seminar for report from the DTI Global Watch project "Beyond eLearning: practical insights from the USA" along seemingly with half of the UK e-learning world.

Presentations are available from here.

I thought the content of the day itself was disappointing. Nigel Paine gave a nice keynote based on his BBC viewpoint and not really relating to the research itself. Interesting but not the best use of time. The individual research reports were fairly superficial, with little real insight into companies visited or specifics in the USA. I thought that was the point of the session, but obviously I was mistaken.

Charles Jennings and Gordon Bull did their normal good job, but not sure there was any new insight. Most forthright and therefore valuable of the sessions was Euan Mackenzie from 3MRT on Game-based learning - really challenging the assumption (echoed by the others) that the US wasn't ahead of the game (pardon the pun), other than maybe in the Military which they didn't look at.

Overall thing that struck me though was how eLearning 0.0 the event was to talk about eLearning 2.0 and related stuff. All gather in London for a one day session. Cram into a lecture hall with a printed report and stand and deliver sessions just scratching the topics.

Sorry guys, nice idea but need to be more innovative in getting the learning out into the community. Maybe someone should have blogged it!